Thursday 2 December 2010

mr muscle's rivalry with the grim reaper is admirable, but there can only be one winner

the unpredictability of death is a blessing in disguise

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How gratifyingly ironic that the most calculable of inevitabilities is so recurrently branded as unpredictable. What goes up, must come down; what lives must eventually die. Unless you're Claire Bennet, Peter Petrelli, Adam Monroe or Sylar from Heroes. Each as sexually attractive and effulgently indestructible as the last. Ah, to be immortal. To be able to impress the beautiful and wondrous Claire Bennet with my glimmering immortality. Instead I am condemned to my tenuous daydreams with my pathetic and unimpressive ability to die. She could never love a man like me. Nope, she'd probably write in her diary about how shit I am.

'Dear Diary, today Jack bought me a chocolate milkshake with marshmallows. As he handed it to me with shaking hands, he dropped it on the floor and glass went everywhere. In his haste to clear up the mess, he cut himself. He didn't regenerate immediately and there was blood everywhere. What a good-for-nothing, incompetent, feckless, fucking waste of space that dickhead is. I told him I had to rush home for dinner then stopped by Sylars house, he was so immortal that I sucked him dryer than a freshly laundered towel. Yours forever (literally! Oh Diary, you never tire of that one), Claire xx'

Well I tell you what Claire. Why don't you take that feculent, obscene, polluted language of yours, mould it as a concept into some form of expressive sculpture and shove that sculpture down your filthy, death-defying throat you whore.

Being able to die won’t improve your love life. Going up to a fine looking lady and saying “Hey sugar, see me? Yeaaaahh – I’ll be dead one day” probably won’t get you the sweet lovin’ you so cravingly desire. It’ll most likely get you a puzzled look, a cold shoulder and an escourt outside from security. Mortality is no good thing. It is also no bad thing. It’s neutral. It’s part and parcel of the dreadfully predictable and exquisitely aberrant whirlwind of life. What better motivation could there be to do all the things you’ve ever wanted to do than the fact that you could be crushed into the ground by an uprising army of furiously angry, giant robotic Terrapins? It’s unlikely. Very, very unlikely. But shit! You don’t want the grief of thinking ‘I wish I’d bought a Macbook’ whilst being stomped into the cold, hard ground by an ill-tempered, mechanical reptile. That will actually be Apple’s next major advertising campaign – you heard it here first. “iPhone 5 – because sometimes colossal, motorised Terrapins attack.”

If any fear is rational it’s the fear of death. Brutal, fateful, unforgiving death wiping the slate of your life clean like a noxious, calamitous bottle of poisonous bathroom cleaner. That wily fucking Grim Reaper. Use to be he’d stand boldly before you and smash a scythe upside your head. Now he sneaks up on you like a ninja and does you with a fatal dose of Deathtox (kills 99.9% of bacteria and you). The unpredictability of death is a blessing on the condition you embrace it as such. Therein lies the art of perception and the key to happiness. Always look on the bright side of life. Do you think Eric Idle wrote that song to inject joy, exuberance and comic effect to Monty Python? Of course not! It’s an important life lesson. Why not charge into the unrelenting gunfire of death through the swampy minefield of life? There’s nothing beyond those locked, loaded, projectile firing harbingers of doom but a promise land filled with an infinite number of ways to die. So you can live with fear and without risk, leave your house once in 80 years only to gently fall over a small rock and die of internal bleeding. OR you can charge passionately through life wearing a giddy smile and meet the bullets of death directly with your face! Fuck yeah! There is only a cheap, party shop disguise veiling the blessing that is the unpredictability of death. Stampede with devotion and feeling towards those guns. Head for the promise land! If my death is inevitable then the best I can hope is that it’ll at least be fucking interesting. I don’t want to lie on my deathbed watching re-runs of Inspector Morse, coughing mucus into a cardboard tray. I want to choke to death on a snorkel mid-fight with a shark! Get treated for a critical medical condition by Dr Dre in a hilarious misunderstanding! Get clouted by a car whilst crossing a zebra crossing – on a zebra!

Embrace and envelop your fears. Let them take you to places you never dreamed you’d be. Tend each curse to consecration. Who knows, you might get shot in the face. Brilliant.

1 comment:

  1. I don't know how this makes me feel, a little empty, and with a strange urge to ride a zebra out in front of an 18 wheeler.

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